I have always thought of Friedrich Nietzsche as a problematic thinker. By 'problematic' I do not simply mean that he wrote things that are worrisome (which is certainly true). Rather, I mean that he is someone whose thought is far more complex and nuanced than he is typically given credit for. For instance, I have more than once taught courses where, when we got to Nietzsche, the atheistic students in the class would feel initially emboldened. After all, Nietzsche is the author of the famous 'Parable of the Madman,' containing the proclamation that 'God is dead.' Overlooking the complex Lutheran milieu in which Nietzsche wrote those words, such students often think of Nietzsche as the precursor to the twenty-first century, scientistically minded folks such as Dawkins and Harris. They are typically appalled when they reach the final essay in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche writes, 'These two, science and ascetic ideal, they do, after all, stand on one and the same ground ... on the same overestimation of truth [Vern's note: and before any readers accuse him (or me) of denying truth (for shame!!!!), let me finish this quote] ... on the same belief in the inassessibility, the uncriticizability of truth...' For Nietzsche, the sciences have become the post-Enlightenment religion du jour, and he is every bit as worried (at times appearing even more so) about the value of the sciences, as he is about the erstwhile and lingering centrality of religion in human lives. Students are shocked to learn that the author of The Antichrist, who characterized Christian morality as 'slave morality,' also wrote the following, citing the Christian Gospels: 'The Kingdom of God does not "come" chronologically-historically, on a certain day in the calendar, something that might be here one day but not the day before: it is an "inward change in the individual," something that comes at every moment and at every moment has not yet arrived---' This is what I mean by characterizing Nietzsche as a 'problematic' thinker. 

I was recently reminded of this nuance to Nietzsche's thought when I reread his passage on marriage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Of course, Nietzsche is notorious for having written some of the most appalling remarks on the institutions of family and marriage. But then one comes across a passage such as this: 'Marriage: thus I name the will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it. Reverence for each other, as for those willing with such a will, is what I name marriage. Let this be the meaning and truth of your marriage.' One is unlikely to find this passage in any list of inspirational quotes about marriage or love, and yet it is one of the strongest and most beautiful representations of marriage I have ever read. 

Dissecting it a little bit, Nietzsche roots this sort of love and marriage in an act of the will, an ongoing, unwavering commitment of the spirit. This reminds me of his remarks on the concept of the promise in the Genealogy: 'not simply indigestion from a once-pledged word over which one cannot regain control, but rather an active no-longer-wanting-to-get-rid-of, a willing on and on of something one has once willed, a true memory of the will...' Interestingly as well, marriage is a will of two. These are two individuals who actively and ongoingly choose each other. Love and marriage, according to Nietzsche, ought to derive from strength of character and of will, and from a mutual reverence for one another. (It is worth noting that in this passage Nietzsche does not assign traditionally sexed roles to the marriage partners). Love, for Nietzsche, is based upon strength, as opposed to weakness. 

This brings us to the next point. The way that we often think of love, particularly in the West, is that it is a weakness, something that happens to us, some place that we fall, etc. Or we think of it in the terms of a cure for a spiritual sickness -- that human beings are born sickly and incomplete, and require the love of another, reciprocally incomplete person, so that together the two may complete each other. Rather than two strong individuals who mutually strengthen each other, two weak and deficient individuals who need each other just to get by. This is a co-dependent view of love, with all the attendant addiction connotations attached. It is this sort of love, I think, that Nietzsche finds paltry. In that same passage in Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, 'But that which the all-too-many, the superfluous, call marriage---alas, what shall I name that? Alas, this poverty of the soul in pair! Alas, this wretched contentment in pair! Marriage they call this; and they say that their marriages are made in heaven. Well, I do not like it, this heaven of the superfluous.' A little further down, he writes that 'for the most part, two beasts find each other.' As with so many other concepts and critiques in Nietzsche's writings, it seems that it is a certain type of marriage and of love that Nietzsche rejects. 

Jean Wahl is one of the most important figures in twentieth century French philosophy, yet he is also, unfortunately, one of the most overlooked in the Anglophone world. Here is William Hackett's translation of Wahl's landmark 1944 text, Existence humaine et transcendence. This work is based on a 1937 lecture, and deals with the concepts of being, transcendence, and Wahl's unique conceptions of 'transascendence' and 'transdescendence.' This work had a profound impact on later French thinkers of the twentieth century, and an English translation is long overdue. 

Here is a Notre Dame Philosophical Review of the work by Edward Baring. 

I recently read a very interesting piece by Umberto Eco on Thomas Aquinas, in Eco's book, Travels in Hyperreality. It's a very short piece, in which he argues that the worst thing to ever happen to Thomas was his codification by the church. 

In Eco's words, 'The worst thing that happened to Thomas Aquinas in the course of his career was not his death ... Nor was it what happened three years after his death, when the Archbishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, published a list of heretical propositions (two hundred and nineteen of them) that included the majority of the theses of the followers of Averroes, ... and twenty propositions clearly attributable to him, Thomas, the angelic doctor himself, son of the lordly family of Aquino. ... No, the disaster that ruined the life of Tommaso d'Aquino befell him in 1323, two years after the death of Dante and was perhaps, also, to some degree, attributable to the poet: in other words, when John XXII decided to turn Tommaso into Saint Thomas Aquinas. ... It's the moment when the big arsonist is appointed Fire Chief.' 

Thomas, Eco argues, was a subversive, unique, and original thinker (it's important to remember that Aristotle was persona non grata at this point in Church history and in Christian thought, and that most of the 'heretical propositions' to which Eco refers stem ultimately from Aristotle), and what Thomas did, better than anyone, was to think through, in an original manner, all the conceptual, philosophical, and theological problems of his day. What was most impressive, Eco argues, was Thomas's originality. But once Thomas is codified by the church, Eco argues, intellectual progress in the Church more or less hit pause, as it was then believed that all the problems were solved, and there was nothing else to really do, except keep rehashing the Thomistic project.

Here is an interesting piece by Abeba Birhane, in which she argues, against Descartes, that our sense of self is necessarily mediated through our relations to other human beings. One particularly interesting moment is when she points out that prisoners in isolation begin to lose their own sense of self: 'Deprived of contact and interaction ... a person risks disappearing into non-existence.' 

It reminded me of Derrida's rich analyses in Voice and Phenomenon, where he argues, through Husserl's model of the living present, that the self relates to itself only as if to an other, even in our most seemingly interior and private moments. Even our self-relations, in other words, are relations to alterity. 

'The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self...' - Søren Kierkegaard

Penelope Deutscher's recent book, Foucault's Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason, is here reviewed by Colin Koopman from the University of Oregon. 

I just picked up Beckman's new book on Deleuze, in Reaktion's Critical Lives series. Beckman characterizes the book as 'a critical effort that endeavours to illuminate some fruitful dialogues between Deleuze's life and work.' I have so far skipped around in passages throughout, but the book looks to be a remarkably important contribution to Deleuze scholarship. Part-biography, part-critical introduction, she manages to, in 125 pages, examine most of the key moments in the evolution of Deleuze's thinking, demonstrating an astonishing facility with the overall history of Deleuze scholarship on many of the most important debates. I can't wait to read the rest of the book more closely. 

In this recent Aeon piece, Costica Bradatan dips into the ongoing debate about the extent to which art can actually do philosophy. He argues that, regardless of their adherence or lack thereof to any technical definitions of philosophy, films 'can have on us the same effect that the great, perennial works of philosophy do: shake and awaken us, breathe new life into our minds, open us up to new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us.'

The orthodox rebuttal, of course, is that unlike philosophy, art does not deal in arguments. Indeed, as many artists will explicitly assert, not only does art not make arguments, but when it tries to make arguments, more often than not, it ends up being bad art. The more didactic it is, the weaker it is artistically. 

As I continue to come down from last weekend's David Foster Wallace conference, I stumbled onto this Salon piece, reflecting upon Wallace's prescient forewarning regarding the seductive dangers of reality-TV culture, (if 'culture' in this instance is the right term). Like James Incandenza's film, Infinite Jest - a film that entertains its viewers to death - we are rapidly spectating ourselves into a nihilistic conflagration. One might wish to find solace in the fact that Trump's approval rating declines on a nearly daily basis, and that he is now sitting at record low support for any president at this point in their administration. Is this not, we might wonder, evidence that America is growing weary of the Reality-TV President? Yet, we risk missing the forest for the trees if we fail to see that Trump is merely part of a much larger problem - one player in the spectacular carnival of souls that daily constitutes our leisurely milieu. However low his numbers may be, we (and I speak from a first-person perspective) continue to watch. We tune in to find out what's new with the Russia investigation, we wait with bated breath to see which official he will inappropriately fire next, we laugh snarkily at his latest tweets, we cheer on the folks at CNN as they assume the mantra of political satire. We are no less enamored of the spectacle than we were two years ago - spectating ourselves to apocalypse.  

A photo of me with two lovely human beings - Charlie and Victoria Harris - at the David Foster Wallace conference this past weekend. Victoria and Charlie were both in the English department at Illinois State University during Wallace's time there. Both were close friends, and Charlie was the person responsible for hiring Wallace to the faculty. I made two new friends, one of whom - Victoria - is a fellow Derrida enthusiast! Just two of the many terrific people I met this weekend! 

I'm here at the David Foster Wallace conference in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. It's good to be back in the Midwest! I've heard some really outstanding papers, and met some great people. 

Jeffrey Severs gave a wonderful keynote today on DFW as a thinker of immanence, drawing connections between Wallace, Franz Kafka, and Deleuze and Guattari, exploring the significance of doors in Wallace's work. It's been a terrific weekend.